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From Out of the
Shadows
MEXICAN WOMEN IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
AMERICA

Tenth Anniversary Edition

Vicki L. Ruiz

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

Oxford University's objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Copyright © 1998, 2008 by Vicki L. Ruiz
First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1998
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1999
Tenth anniversary edition published by Oxford University Press, 2008
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www. oup. com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ruiz, Vicki.
From out of the shadows: Mexican women
in twentieth-century America / Vicki L. Ruiz.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-537478-0 (cloth) 978-0-19-537477-3 (pbk.)
1. Mexican American women—History—20th century.
2. Mexican American women—Social conditions.
I. Title E184.M5R86 1997
305.48'86872073—dc21 97-9387
Permission credits:
Sections of Chapter 2 were published as
"Dead Ends or Gold Mines: Using Missionary Records
in Mexican American Women's History, "
Frontiers 12:1 (1991): 35-56.
An earlier draft of Chapter 3 was published as
"The Flapper and the Chaperone: Historical Memory
Among Mexican American Women"
in Seeking Common Ground: A Multidisciplinary Reader
on Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna Gabaccia (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 141-157.
"University Avenue" by Pat Mora
is reprinted with permission from the publisher
of Borders (Houston: Arte Piiblico Press, 1986).

3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
FOR THE STORYTELLERS WHO GAVE ME HISTORY LESSONS AT HOME

In memory of my grandmother
Maria de las Nieves Moya de Ruiz
(1880-1971)

and to my mother
Erminia Pablita Ruiz Mercer
(1921-2001)
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction yd
1. Border Journeys 3
2. Confronting "America" 33
3. The Flapper and the Chaperone 51
4. With Pickets, Baskets, and Ballots 72
5. La Nueva Chicana: Women and the Movement 99
6. Claiming Public Space 127
Epilogue 147
Afterword 152
Appendix 166
Notes 171
Bibliography 227
Index 249
This page intentionally left blank
 Ac knowledgments

1 HIS book would not be possible without the voices of the indi-
viduals who have shaped this narrative, as historical actors, as
scholars, and as friends. First, I would like to thank the following
people who shared with me their memories: Eusebia Buriel, Ray
Buriel, Elsa Chavez, Carmen Bernal Escobar, Alma Araiza Garcia,
Fernando Garcia, Martha Gonzalez, Dorothy Ray Healey, Lucy
Lucero, Ernest Moreno, Graciela Martinez Moreno, the late Luisa
Moreno, Julia Luna Mount, Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, Maria
del Carmen Romero, my mother Erminia Pablita Ruiz Mercer, and
Jesusita Torres. I thank my former students Carolyn Arredondo, Je-
susita Ponce, Lydia Linares Peake, and David Ybarra for giving me
permission to cite their oral interviews. With generosity and en-
couragement, Sherna Berger Gluck has allowed me to quote from
several volumes of the Rosie the Riveter Revisited oral history col-
lection housed at California State University, Long Beach.
During my ten years of wandering in and out of archives, staff
members have been extraordinarily helpful and I express a deep ap-
preciation to Christine Marin, Special Collections, Arizona State
University; Rose Diaz and Tom Jaehn, Special Collections, Zim-
merman Library, University of New Mexico; Katherine Kane and
Anne Bonds, Colorado Historical Society; Kate Adams, Barker His-
tory Center and Margo Gutierrez, Benson Library, University of
Texas, Austin; and Maria E. Flores, Our Lady of the Lake College,
-^Jviii^ Acknowledgments

San Antonio. I also thank the helpful staff at the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley; Special Collections, University
of California, Los Angeles; Southern California Library for Social
Studies and Research (especially Sarah Cooper); Coleccion Tloque
Nahuaque, Chicano Studies Library, University of California,
Santa Barbara; Western History Department, Denver Public Li-
brary; Houchen Community Center, El Paso; Daughters of the Re-
public of Texas Library at the Alamo; Labor Archives, University of
Texas, Arlington; DeGroyler Library, Southern Methodist Univer-
sity; University Archives, New Mexico State University; and the
Arizona Historical Society Library, Tucson.
A debt of gratitude goes out to Victor Becerra, Ernie Chavez,
Tom Jaehn, Valerie Matsumoto, Lara Medina, Beatriz Pesquera,
Denise Segura, Howard Shorr, and Devra Weber for taking time
out of their own busy schedules to share with me photographs,
newspaper clippings, and primary materials. Thank you more than
words can convey. I also acknowledge friends and colleagues who
sent me their published and unpublished papers, works that have
unquestionably enriched this manuscript: GabrielaArredondo, Ray
Buriel, Gilbert Cadena, Roberto Calderon, Angel Cervantes, Ernie
Chavez, Marisela Chavez, Kenton Clyrner, Virginia Espino, Jeff
Garcflazo, Ramon Gutierrez, Tom Jaehn, Anne Larson, Margo
McBane, Jesus Malaret, Valerie Matsumoto, Lara Medina, Cynthia
Orozco, Naomi Quinonez, Ada Sosa Riddell, Margaret Rose,
George Sanchez, Marjorie Sanchez-Walker, Denise Segura, Maria
Soldatenko, Richard Street, Quintard Taylor, and Zaragosa Vargas.
I have been blessed with the privilege of working with a num-
ber of highly motivated and talented graduate students, people who
will definitely make a difference in our profession. The UC Davis
cohort includes James Brooks, Kevin Leonard, Jennifer Levine,
Matthew Lasar, Jesus Franscisco Malaret and of course, the "Sis-
terhood"—Kathleen Cairns, Annette Reed Crum, Margaret Jacobs,
Olivia Martinez-Krippner, Alicia Rodriquez-Estrada, and Yolanda
Calderon Wallace. The Claremont crew wants to set the world on
fire: Frank Barajas, Virginia Espino, Matthew Garcia, Timothy
Hodgdon, Alice Horn, Peg Lamphier, Matthew Lasar, Lara Medina,
Marian Perales, Naomi Quinonez, Alicia Rodriquez-Estrada, Ar-
lene Sanchez-Walsh, Emilie Stoltzfus, Mary Ann Villarreal, and
Antonia Villasenor are comitted to the bridging of the academy and
the community. I have also enjoyed my many conversations with
Pat Ash, Philip Castruita, Antonia Garcia, Lee Ann Meyer, Kat
Norman, and Amanda Perez. A special thanks is reserved for
 Acknowledgments •$ ix $*•

Marisela Chavez, Virginia Espino, Timothy Hodgdon, Peg Lam-

phier, Laura Munoz and Mary Ann Villarreal, my current graduate
students who migrated with me to the "dry heat" of Arizona and to
the daughters of the desert, Luisa Bonillas, Rose Diaz, Christine
Marin, and Jean Reynolds, who have made us all feel so welcome.
Institutional support for this manuscript has come from many
sources. An American Council for Learned Societies Fellowship
proved crucial in the early phases of this project. A UC Davis Hu-
manities Fellowship and a faculty development award allowed me
to take a one-year sabbatical from the classroom. In addition, re-
search funds associated with the Mellon Humanities chair that I
held for three years at The Claremont Graduate School along with
a summer research grant and a Haynes Fellowship provided funds
to complete the archival research and transcribe interviews. I wrote
the last chapters at Arizona State University where I recieved a one
semester sabbatical.
At UC Davis, my undergraduate assistants (both are now attor-
neys) Amagda Perez and Viola Romero were conscientious to a
fault. Thanks also to Ada Arensdorf, Jaime Ruiz and Eve Carr. The
meticulous efforts of Timothy Hodgdon and Matthew Lasar proved
invaluable in preparing the manuscript for publication. Mis com-
paneras/os Angie Chabram-Dernesesian, Ed Escobar, Estelle
Freedman, Gayle Gullett, Gail Martinez, Valerie Matsumoto, Beat-
riz Pesquera, Mary Rothschild, Raquel Salgado Scherr, Howard
Shorr, Susan Tiano, and Clarence Walker helped me regain my fo-
cus during a very difficult time in my life.
At various stages, several individuals offered inspiration and
constructive criticism. I would like to thank Ram6n Gutierrez,
George Lipsitz, Betita Martinez, Valerie Matsumoto, and Howard
Shorr for their careful readings of one or more chapters. The ASU
Women's History Reading Group, particularly Michelle Curran,
Susan Gray, Gayle Gullett, Mary Melcher, and Sybil Thornton,
provided support and insight. Peggy Pascoe and Sarah Deutsch
read the entire manuscript and their comments (and Peggy's line
editing) substantially strengthened the narrative as a whole. Peggy
y Sally—gracias por todo.
I have felt privileged to work with Sheldon Meyer, a steadfast
advocate and extraordinary editor. I also acknowledge the careful
attention paid to this manuscript by Brandon Trissler and Helen
Mules. Their professionalism and enthusiasm eased this overpro-
tective author. Rosemary Wellner, too, deserves thanks for her skills
as a copy editor.
$ X& Acknowledgments

To my knowledge, there are only seventeen Chicanas with

PhDs in history. I am number four. Often we labor alone, subject to
"proving" our research and our very presence in the academy. I
would like to acknowledge the labors of Louise Kerr, Raquel Casas,
Antonia Castaneda, Miroslava Chavez, Deena Gonzalez, Camille
Guerin Gonzales, Lara Medina, Gloria Miranda, Maria Montoya,
Lorena Oropeza, Cynthia Orozco, Emma Perez, Naomi Quinonez,
Yolanda Romero, Elizabeth Salas, and Shirlene Soto and to honor
the legacies of the late Irene Ledesma and Magdalena Mora.
There are no words to describe the appreciation and love I have
for the wonderful men who have graced my life. When I completed
Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, my sons Miguel and Danny were
six and three. In ten years, Miguel has gone from decorating the
door with crayons to enjoying new challenges with a driver's license
and Danny's taste in television has changed from Sesame Street to
MTV. I value their patience and resilience in the midst of our sev-
eral moves. They have borne their absentminded mother with good
humor and much love. My father Robert Mercer passed away into
the next life on November 14, 1995, after a long illness, but I feel
his presence and independent spirit. A man of honor, gentle
strength, with a great capacity for love, Victor Becerra, my hus-
band, changed my life. Victor has contributed in many ways to the
shaping of this work. Listening to scattered passages, reading pre-
liminary drafts, and offering well-placed suggestions, he reminds
me to write from the heart.

v. L. R.
 Introduction

WHEN I was a child, I learned two types of history—the one at

home and the one at school. My mother and grandmother would
regale me with tales of their Colorado girlhoods, stories of village
life, coal mines, strikes, discrimination, and family lore. At school,
scattered references were made to Coronado, Ponce De Le6n, the
Alamo, and Pancho Villa. That was the extent of Latino history.
Bridging the memories told at the table with printed historical nar-
ratives fueled my decision to become a historian.
From Out of the Shadows focuses on the claiming of personal
and public spaces across generations. As farm workers, flappers, la-
bor activists, barrio volunteers, civic leaders, and feminists, Mexi-
can women have made history. Their stories, however, have re-
mained in the shadows.
The introduction to my first book, Cannery Women, Cannery
Lives, refers to the shadowing of Mexican women's experiences.
"Scholarly publications on Mexican American history have usually
relegated women to landscape roles. The reader has a vague aware-
ness of the presence of women, but only as scenery, not as ac-
tors . . . and even their celebrated maternal roles are sketched in
muted shades." Little did I realize that this theme had also res-
onated among earlier chroniclers of Spanish New Mexico, most
notably Cleofas Jaramillo. In 1941, she compiled a collection of
folklore, Sombras del pasado/Shadows of the Past, in which she drew
-$ xii % Introduction

on the collective memories of her Hispano narrators.1 Similarly, I

have drawn on the collective voices of the women who have shaped
and given meaning to my work.
Race, class, and gender have become familiar watchwords,
maybe even a mantra, for social historians, but few get beneath the
surface to explore their intersections in a manner that sheds light
on power and powerlessness, boundaries and voice, hegemony and
agency. This book addresses issues of interpreting voice and locat-
ing power between and within communities, families, and individ-
uals. Women's lives, dreams, and decisions take center stage.
Women of Mexican birth or descent refer to themselves by
many names—Mexicana, Mexican American, and Chicana (to
name just three). Self-identification speaks volumes about re-
gional, generational, and even political orientations. The term
Mexicana typically refers to immigrant women, with Mexican
American signifying U.S. birth. Chicana reflects a political con-
sciousness borne of the Chicano Student Movement, often a gen-
erational marker for those of us coming of age during the 1960s
and 1970s. Chicana/o has also been embraced by our elders and
our children who share in the political ideals of the movement.
Some prefer regional identification, such as Tejana (Texan) or His-
pana (New Mexican). Spanish American is also popular in New
Mexico and Colorado. Latina emphasizes a common bond with all
women of Latin American origin in the United States, a politicized
Pan American identity. Even racial location can be discerned by
whether one favors an Iberian connection (Hispanic) or an indige-
nous past (Mestiza or Xicana).
As part of her stand-up routine, lesbian writer and comic Mon-
ica Palacios articulates her multiple identities as follows:

When I was born

I was of Mexican-American persuasion
Then I became Chicana
Then I was Latina
Then I was Hispanic
Then I was a Third World member
(my mom loved that)
Then I was a woman of color
Now I'm just an Amway dealer
And my life is happening.2

Literary critic Alicia Arrizon refers to Palacios's work as "one of

challenge where humor becomes the tool of reconstructing ways of
 Introduction 4 xiii fc-

understanding the self." Poet and novelist Alicia Caspar de Alba

conveys the image of the Chicana writer as "the curandera (medi-
cine woman) or the bruja (witch) . . . the keeper of culture, the
keeper of memories."3 The exploration of identities, the conserva-
tion and creation of cultural practices and traditions, and the re-
construction of historical narratives are not without political in-
tent. In the words of Sonia Saldivar-Hull, "The Chicana feminist
looks to her history . . . to learn how to transform the present."4
Focusing on the twentieth century and the Southwest, this
book surveys women's border journeys not solely in terms of travel,
but of internal migration—creating, accommodating, resisting, and
transforming the physical and psychological environs of their
"new" lives in the United States. These are journeys of survival, re-
siliency, and community. They reveal, to quote Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, "the material politics of everyday life, especially the daily
life struggles of poor people—those written out of history."5
In 1900, Mexican women had a long history of settlement in
what is now the Southwest extending back to the Coronado expe-
dition of 1540. Historians, including Ram6n Gutierrez, Albert Hur-
tado, Antonia Castaneda, Angelina Veyna, and James Brooks, have
reconstructed the ideological beliefs and physical realities of
women in the Spanish Borderlands across racial and social loca-
tions from the elite gentry to indentured servants.6 In addition,
Deena Gonzdlez, Sarah Deutsch, and Lisbeth Haas carefully delin-
eate the lives of Spanish-speaking women in the decades following
the U.S.—Mexican War (1846—1848), and, in placing women at the
center of Hispano communities, they document gendered strate-
gies for resisting political, economic, and cultural conquests.7
Women's kin and friend networks—their comadres—were indis-
pensable for both personal and cultural survival. Comadres helping
comadres, neighbors joining neighbors—such patterns of mutual
assistance run through the histories of Mexican—American women.
Through mutual assistance and collective action, Mexican
women have sought to exercise control over their lives at home,
work, and neighborhood. From 'Out of the Shadows opens with
"Border Journeys," a chapter that details the ways in which Mexi-
canas claimed places, albeit economically precarious ones, for
themselves and their families in the United States while "Con-
fronting America" records their efforts to create their own cultural
spaces. "The Flapper and the Chaperone" focuses on the second
generation taking the first individual steps toward sexual autonomy.
"With Pickets, Baskets, and Ballots" surveys women's activist paths
in labor unions, voluntary associations, and political affiliations.
-^1 xiv £- Introduction

"La Nueva Chicana" examines the development of a distinctive

Chicana feminist consciousness, a consciousness with historical
antecedents predating the 1960s and with contemporary lessons
for bridging individual and community empowerment. Covering
the period 1970 to the present, "Claiming Public Space" empha-
sizes the ways in which women from the shop floor to city hall have
made a difference in their lives and their neighbors' lives through
community-based organizations.
It is important to situate this thread of public and private
spaces that appears in each chapter. One's positionality inside the
home, the community, and the workplace cannot be separated into
neat categories of analysis. The feminist edifice of separate spheres
need not apply as "the inextricable nature of family life and wage
work in the histories of immigrant wives and women of color
explodes the false oppositions at the heart of the public/private
dichotomy."8 Integration, rather than separation, provides a more
illuminating construct in exploring the dynamics of Mexicana/Chi-
cana work and family roles.
A second thread running through the narrative is that of cul-
tural coalescence. Immigrants and their children pick, borrow,
retain, and create distinctive cultural forms. There is not a single
hermetic Mexican or Mexican—American culture, but rather per-
meable cultures rooted in generation, gender, and region, class, and
personal experience. People navigate across cultural boundaries
and consciously make decisions with regard to the production of
culture. However, bear in mind that people of color have not had
unlimited choice. Race and gender prejudice and discrimination
with their accompanying social, political, and economic segmen-
tation have constrained aspirations, expectations, and decision-
making.
Though filtered through the lens of time and mediated by the
interviewer, oral histories shed much light on individual stories of
resistance, resilience, and creativity. It is not a question of "giving"
voice, but of providing the space for people to express their
thoughts and feelings in their words and on their own terms. Re-
claiming, contextualizing, and interpreting their memories remain
the historians' tasks. I am reminded of a line in William Blake's
"Auguries of Innocence"—"To see a world in a grain of sand."9
In September 1992, the Los Angeles Times carried an article
about a Mexican—American photo exhibit at the El Monte Histori-
cal Museum.10 Though a bit timid behind the wheel, I gathered my
courage and ventured onto the freeway bound for El Monte. Inside
 Introduction -f xv %

the museum, I lingered over pictures documenting migrant life: the

Hick's Camp barrio, family weddings, and neighborhood celebra-
tions. I even noticed images of the popular Long Beach nightspot,
the Cinderella Ballroom, where couples posed in front of paper
moons and caboose facades. An elderly Mexicana entered the room
accompanied by her daughter. She began to identify all the people
and landmarks captured in the photographs. I introduced myself
and tagged along as she graciously gave us a history lesson. A few
months later, Jesusita Torres invited me into her home and shared
with me her remarkable story of survival and hope. Her journey un-
folds here.
This page intentionally left blank
 1
Border Journeys

1 HE year is 1923; the place G6mez Palacios in the Mexican state

of Durango. As she watched her mother pack a few belongings, Je-
susita Torres was warned by her mother Pasquala Esparza not to
tell anyone of their plans. Several days later, shortly before noon,
Pasquala would sneak out of the family home with nine-year-old Je-
susita at her side and one-month-old Raquel in her arms. They
headed for the train station with Pasquala surveying the landscape
for any signs of her husband or his relations. She must have
breathed a sigh of relief as the train began its journey to Ciudad
Juarez from which she hoped to cross with her children into the
United States.
During our interview seventy years later, Senora Torres would
reveal that her stepfather (Raquel's biological father) in G6mez
Palacios had been cruel to her and her mother. In her words:

I never knew my father. . . . My mother got married again and

things did not work. I guess they did not work because I was mis-
treated, too, you know. So I think the only way she could get away
was to come over here.1

Pasquala intended to stay in Juarez until she had the money to se-
cure passports for herself and her children. Her destination was El
Monte, California, to live with her married sister.
.
%4 % From Out of the Shadows

That same year in the village of San Julian in the Los Altos re-
gion of Jalisco, Petra Sanchez made plans to return to the United
States with her husband Ramon, their three infants (two-year-old
Guadalupe, one-year-old Librado, and newborn Margarita) and
five-year-old Jose, the son of Ramon and his late wife Guadalupe
Rocha. The villagers of San Julian may have thought Petra and
Ramon an unusual couple. Theirs had not been a conventional
courtship. Ramon's late wife Guadalupe had been Petra's older sis-
ter. When Guadalupe and her daughter Ampelia succumbed to the
global influenza outbreak of 1918, Ramon decided that he and Jose
should live with the Rochas. Whether by choice or arrangement,
Ramon and Petra married in 1920 and then the newlyweds jour-
neyed to California. Laboring as berry pickers in the vicinity of
Buena Park, they hoped to make enough to return to San Julian
with a nice nest egg. They arrived back to the village in 1923, but
within a year the couple decided to make California their home.2
Their second migration was marked by tragedy. When Ramon
moved ahead to Buena Park leaving his family temporarily be-
hind with his brother, baby Margarita died and, as Librado would
later recall to his niece Marjorie Sanchez-Walker, "mother was
alone . . . when Margarita died." By 1924, Ramon, Petra, and their
increasing family worked in the fields of Knott's Berry Farm.
About fifty miles to the north in El Monte, Pasquala and her
daughter Jesusita would also be picking berries.3
Jesusita Torres and Petra Sanchez were part of the first modern
wave of Mexican immigration to the United States. The society
they entered was one already marked by multiple conquests, mi-
grations, and overlapping patriarchies. As previously mentioned,
Spanish-speaking women migrated north from Mexico decades,
even centuries before their Euro-American counterparts ventured
west. Most arrived as the wives or daughters of soldiers, farmers,
and artisans. Over the course of three centuries, they raised fami-
lies on the frontier and worked alongside their fathers or husbands,
herding cattle and tending crops.4
Women's networks based on ties of blood and fictive kinship
proved central to the settlement of the Spanish/Mexican frontier.
At times women settlers acted as midwives to mission Indians and
baptized sickly or stillborn babies. As godmothers for these infants,
they established the bonds of commadrazgo between Native Amer-
ican and Spanish/Mexican women.5 However, exploitation took
place among women. For those in domestic service, racial and class
hierarchies undermined any pretense of sisterhood. While the god-
 Border Journeys •$ 5 £

parent relationship could foster ties between colonists and Native

Americans, elites used baptism as a venue of social control. Inden-
tured servitude was prevalent on the colonial frontier and persisted
well into the nineteenth century.6
Spanish/Mexican settlement has been shrouded by myth. Walt
Disney's Zorro, for example, epitomized the notion of romantic Cal-
ifornia controlled by fun-loving, swashbuckling rancheros. Since
only 3 percent of California's Spanish/Mexican population could
be considered rancheros in 1850, most women did not preside over
large estates, but helped manage small family farms.7 Married
women on the Spanish/Mexican frontier had certain legal advan-
tages not afforded their Euro-American peers. Under English com-
mon law, women, when they married, became feme covert (or dead
in the eyes of the legal system) and thus could not own property
separate from their husbands. Conversely, Spanish/Mexican wo-
men retained control of their land after marriage and held one-half
interest in the community property they shared with their spouses.8
Life for Mexican settlers changed dramatically in 1848 with
the conclusion of the U.S.—Mexican War, the discovery of gold in
California, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexicans on the
U.S. side of the border became second-class citizens, divested of
their property and political power. Their world turned upside down.
Segregated from the Euro-American population, Mexican Ameri-
cans in the barrios of the Southwest sustained their sense of iden-
tity and cherished their traditions. With little opportunity for
advancement, Mexicans were concentrated in lower-echelon in-
dustrial, service, and agricultural jobs.9 A few elite families, espe-
cially in New Mexico, retained their land and social standing. This
period of conquest, physical and ideological, did not occur in a dis-
passionate environment. Stereotypes affected rich and poor alike,
with Mexicans commonly described as lazy, sneaky, and greasy. In
Euro-American journals, novels, and travelogues, Spanish-speak-
ing women were frequently depicted as flashy, morally deficient
sirens.10
Providing insight into community life, nineteenth-century
Spanish language newspapers reveal ample information on social
mores. Newspaper editors upheld the double standard. Women
were to be cloistered and protected to the extent that some resi-
dents of New Mexico and Arizona protested the establishment of
coeducational public schools."
Despite prevailing conventions, most Mexican women, be-
cause of economic circumstances, sought employment for wages.
-$ 6 £- From Out of the Shadows

Whether in cities or on farms, family members pooled their earn-

ings to put food on the table. Women worked at home taking in
laundry, boarders, and sewing while others worked in the fields, in
restaurants and hotels, and in canneries and laundries.12 As sisters,
cousins, and comadres, women relied on one another for mutual
support. In the words of New Mexico native Fabiola Cabeza de
Baca, "The women . . . had to be resourceful in every way. They
were their own doctors, dressmakers, tailors, and advisers."13
Wage work and mutual assistance were survival strategies that per-
sisted well into the twentieth century across region and generation.
Between 1910 and 1930, over one million Mexicanos (one-
eighth to one-tenth of Mexico's population) migrated "al otro lado."
Arriving in the United States, often with their dreams and little
else, these immigrants settled into existing communities and cre-
ated new ones in the Southwest and Midwest. In 1900, from
375,000 to perhaps as many as 500,000 Mexicans lived in the
Southwest. Within a short space of twenty years, Mexican Ameri-
cans were outnumbered at least two to one and their colonias be-
came immigrant enclaves. In some areas, this transformation ap-
peared even more dramatic. Los Angeles, for example, had a
Mexican population ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 in 1900. By
1930, approximately 150,000 people of Mexican birth or heritage
resided in the city's expanding barrios.14 As David Gutierrez has so
persuasively argued, immigration from Mexico in the twentieth
century has had profound consequences for Mexican Americans in
terms of "daily decisions about who they are—politically, socially,
and culturally—in comparison to more recent immigrants from
Mexico." Indeed, a unique layering of generations has occurred in
which ethnic/racial identities take many forms—from the His-
panos of New Mexico and Colorado whose roots go back to the
eighteenth century to the recently arrived who live as best they can
in the canyons of northern San Diego County.15
Such a heterogeneous Mexican community is not new.
Throughout the twentieth century, a layering of generations can be
detected in schools, churches, community organizations, work
sites, and neighborhoods. Writing about San Bernardino in the
1940s, Ruth Tuck offered the following illustration:

There is a street... on which three families live side by side. The

head of one family is a naturalized citizen, who arrived here eigh-
teen years ago; the head of the second is an alien who came . . .
in 1905; the head of the third is the descendant of people who
 Border Journeys ~% 7 %

came . . . in 1843. All of them, with their families, live in poor

housing; earn approximately $ 150 a month as unskilled laborers;
send their children to "Mexican" schools; and encounter the
same sort of discriminatory practices.16

Inheriting a legacy of colonialism wrought by Manifest Destiny,

Mexicans, regardless of nativity, found themselves segmented into
low-paying, low-status jobs with few opportunities for advance-
ment. Living in segregated barrios, they formed neighborhood as-
sociations and church groups, and created a community life predi-
cated on modes of production, economic and cultural.
This chapter surveys women's border journeys first in terms of
migration and settlement followed by patterns of daily life. The
ways in which women as farm worker mothers, railroad wives, and
miners' daughters negotiated a variety of constraints (economic,
racial, and patriarchal) are at the heart of the narrative. Mexicanas
claimed a space for themselves and their families building commu-
nity through mutual assistance while struggling for some sem-
blance of financial stability, especially in the midst of rising nativist
sentiments that would crest in the deportations and repatriations
of the early 1930s. Whether living in a labor camp, a boxcar settle-
ment, mining town, or urban barrio, Mexican women nurtured
families, worked for wages, built fictive kin networks, and partici-
pated in formal and informal community associations. Through
chain and circular migrations of families, community and kin net-
works intertwined. In Riverside, California, for example, the East-
side barrio by the 1960s had so many members of a single extended
family that Ray Buriel recalled how he and his buddies had to ven-
ture into the rival barrio Casa Blanca to get dates.17
Chain and circular migrations, of course, begin with the act of
crossing the political border separating Mexico and the United
States.18 In writing the history of Mexican immigration, scholars
generally work within a "push/pull" model.19 What material condi-
tions facilitated migration and what expectations did people carry
with them as they journeyed north? Between 1875 and 1910, the
Mexican birthrate soared, resulting in a 50 percent increase in
population. Food prices also spiraled. While dictator Porfirio Diaz
has been credited with the modernization of Mexico, his economic
policies decimated the lives of Mexican rural villagers as they were
displaced from their ejidos (communal land holdings) by commer-
cial (often corporate American) agricultural interests. Perhaps as
many as five million people lost access to their ancestral lands. In
41 8 & From Out of the Shadows

the words of historian Devra Weber, "The independent Mexican

peasantry disappeared, and by 1910 over nine and a half million
people, 96 percent of Mexican families, were landless." By 1900,
American-built and financed railroads offered mass transportation
in Mexico. Since the major rail lines ran north and south (to make
connections with lines on the U.S. side), hopping a train to the bor-
der was a realistic and accessible option.20
Beginning with the Madero uprising of 1910, the Mexican Rev-
olution also spurred migration to the United States. Claiming the
lives of an estimated one to two million people, the ten-year bloody
civil war wreaked economic, political, and social chaos. Starvation
was not unknown and danger a constant companion. Marauders
and soldiers raped and kidnapped young women. Elsie Gonzalez re-
called how her grandmother had protected her sister from soldiers
by throwing a wicker hamper over her and sitting on top of it until
the men had left. The soldaderas, whether as wives, sweethearts, or
paid service workers or as women who fought in their own right in
their own units, shouldered multiple responsibilities in the course
of a single day.21 Although only eight years old when Diaz was
routed from power in 1911, Lucia R. had clear memories of the sol-
daderas:

They used to carry the whole house on their backs. In addition,

they carried the small children and a rifle in case they had to tan-
gle with the enemy, too. In a bucket they carried what was neces-
sary to cook. Toward the end of the day, they would stop and set
up camp and start dinner. Pobrecitas, they suffered a lot.22

Although hostilities, for the most part, would cease in 1920,

the economic aftershocks reverberated throughout the following
decade. In addition, the Cristero Revolt prompted further emi-
gration from 1925 to 1929. Several scholars have referred to the
United States as a "safety valve" for Mexicanos seeking to escape
the ravages of war. This metaphor is a good one, not only for cam-
pesinos and artisans, but for government officials, professionals,
and the wealthy. Taking no chances, Seftor Araiza, the mayor of
Guadalupe I. Calvo, Chihuahua, wisely sent his wife and children
to El Paso. He would never see his cherished family again as assas-
sins would take his life during the course of the revolution.23
Immigrants looked to the United States as a source of hope and
employment. They soon discovered that material conditions did
not match their expectations. The early quantitative studies of Al-
 Border Journeys $ 9 £-

bert Camarillo, Ricardo Romo, and Mario Barrera sharply illumi-

nated the economic and social stratification of Mexicans in the
Southwest during the early decades of the twentieth century.24 As
examples, in 1930, the three most common occupations for Mexi-
can men were in agriculture (45 percent), manufacturing (24 per-
cent), and transportation (13 percent). Only 1 percent held profes-
sional positions. Women wage earners could frequently be found in
the service sector (38 percent), in blue-collar employment (25 per-
cent), and in agriculture (21 percent). Only 3 percent were consid-
ered professionals and 10 percent held clerical or sales positions.25
The following discussion sketches out in the broadest strokes the
occupational niches of Mexican immigrants and their families in
the United States.
With the advent of reclamation and irrigation projects and
World War I, commercial agriculture in the Southwest boomed at
the same time that restrictive mandates against Asian immigration
contributed to "a relatively diminishing supply of workers." Grow-
ers avidly recruited Mexicanos, promising wages that seemed ex-
traordinary to campesinos. Lawrence Cardoso indicated that in
Mexico, field workers could earn twelve cents per day while in the
U.S. Southwest daily wages for similar work ranged from $ 1.00 to
$3.50. By 1930, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report,
Mexican agricultural workers earned from $2.75 to $6.00 per day.26
The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company contract dated March 14, 1918,
signed by Severiano Rodriguez stipulated that workers would be
paid $7.00 per acre for blocking and thinning; $2.50 and $,1.50 per
acre for the first and second hoeing, and $10.00 per acre for
pulling, topping, and loading sugar beets. The honoring of such
wages could be another matter altogether. In 1919, a representa-
tive of the Mexican ambassador to the United States would call on
the Commissioner General of Immigration to investigate the phys-
ical conditions of compatriots employed by the Utah-Idaho Sugar
Company based on materials the Mexican embassy had received
from Senor Rodriguez in which he explained that 500 families
"have been left in a very precarious situation."27
Mexicans provided the sinew and muscle on ranches and farms
throughout the West. Historian Camille Guerin-Gonzales indi-
cates that "by 1920, Mexicans formed the largest single ethnic
group among farm workers in California, and during the 1920s,
they became the mainstay of California large-scale, specialty group
agriculture." Pioneering economist Paul Taylor found in Nueces
County, Texas, that Mexicans formed 97 percent of the farm labor
% 10 £- From Out of the Shadows

force. In Arizona, 80 percent of the year-round or "resident" farm

workers were Mexican.28 Migrating into the Pacific Northwest and
Rocky Mountain states, Spanish-speaking workers could also be
found in such disparate places as Nyssa, Oregon, Blackfoot, Idaho,
and Green River, Wyoming. Forming over 65 percent of the sugar
beet harvesters, Mexican communities also emerged in Michigan
and Minnesota. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce related that by
1930 Mexicans picked "more than eighty percent of the perishable
commodities produced in the Southwest."29
The railroads also provided employment. According to Jeff Gar-
cilazo, Mexicanos composed from "about fifty to seventy percent of
the track crews on the major western lines." Labor contractors for
both agribusiness and the railroads traveled to the interior of Mex-
ico to recruit workers holding out such inducements as high wages,
free transportation, and housing. More frequently, such agents
competed with one another in the border city of El Paso.30 The bor-
der journey of the Vasquez family serves as an example. Recruited
by the Rock Island Railroad in Sinalao, Guanajuato, in 1907, Felix
Vasquez and his wife Frederica made their way north. Their first
two children were born in Mexico and then a daughter, Euesbia, in
El Paso. Laboring on the track, Vasquez with his family migrated
from boxcar colonia to boxcar colonia into Arizona, New Mexico,
Iowa, Kansas (where they celebrated the birth of another daugh-
ter), and then settled in Silvis, Illinois, outside Chicago, the birth-
place of four younger children. The boxcar communities could
move at a moment's notice or become permanent settlements.
Midwest rail lines also relied on Mexican labor since over 40 per-
cent of their workers in the Chicago—Gary region were Mexican. In
1927, wages in the rail yards of Detroit averaged $4.00 per day and
Mexican rail hands could be found as far east as Pittsburgh.31
Mining and industrial jobs were other "pull" occupations. By
1910, Arizona had become "the nation's number one producer of
copper" and the Rockefellers' Colorado Fuel and Iron Company
had irrevocably altered the southern Colorado landscape with coal
mines. In both states, a layering of generations occurred similar to
urban areas of the Southwest with Mexicano migrants living and
working alongside native-born Mexican Americans. By the mid-
19205, daily wages averaged from $2.75 to $4.95 for Mexican min-
ers in Arizona.32 Heavy industry in the Midwest also recruited Mex-
ican labor, with Bethelem Steel in Pennsylvania the most notable
example; in the Southwest, construction firms depended on Mexi-
canos. In Mexican Immigration to the United States (1930), an-
 Border Journeys ~% 11 £-

thropologist Manuel Gamio indicated that money orders to Mexico

originated from such unlikely places as Nebraska and New York.
The grandfather of Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez, for example,
made his living as a tailor in New York City. As Francisco Balder-
rama and Raymond Rodriguez astutely observed, "By the 1920s
Mexicans could be found harvesting sugar beets in Minnesota, lay-
ing track in Kansas, packing meat in Chicago, mining coal in Okla-
homa, assembling cars in Detroit, canning fish in Alaska, and
sharecropping in Louisiana."33
Migration within the United States was common and the
Vasquez family journey to Silvis exemplifies the stepping-stone
route to the Midwest. However, most new arrivals lingered closer to
the border. Coming from every Mexican state with a substantial
proportional from the central plateau regions of Michoacan, Jal-
isco, and Guanajuato, 80 percent of this population, by 1930, lived
in the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Col-
orado.34
The experiences of women who journeyed north alone or only
in the company of their children have received scant scholarly
attention. In separate studies, however, Devra Weber and I have
found numerous examples of women, like Pasquala Esparza, who
arrived al otro lado on their own. Manuel Gamio also documents
their experiences, here and there, in his field notes housed at the
Bancroft Library as well as in excerpts published in his The Life
Story of the Mexican Immigrant. The records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, especially the transcripts of the Boards
of Special Inquiry, lend insight into the lives of those who came as
solas or as single mothers.35
Gender marked one's reception at the Stanton Street Bridge
linking Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, especially if one ventured alone.
Men would hear the competing pitches of labor contractors
promising high wages and assorted benefits. Conversely, immigra-
tion inspectors routinely stopped those considered "likely to be-
come a public charge"—in other words solas and single mothers.
Agents scrutinized passport applications and conducted special
hearings to determine women's eligibility for entrance into the
United States.36
Arriving in Ciudad Juarez with a nine-year-old daughter and a
four-week-old infant, Pasquala Esparza discovered she did not have
the necessary funds to obtain the proper passports in El Paso so
she stayed in Ciudad Juarez, finding a job as a housekeeper and a
room in a boardinghouse. The landlady promised to look in on her
-3 12 % From Out of the Shadows

daughters while Pasquala worked; however, it was nine-year-old Je-

susita who shouldered the responsibility for herself and her sister.
Jesusita remembered that as part of her daily routine she would
carry Raquel a long distance to an affluent home where their
mother worked. After preparing the noon meal for her employer,
Pasquala would anxiously wait by the kitchen door. When her chil-
dren arrived, she quickly and quietly ushered them into the
kitchen. While nursing Raquel, she fed Jesusita a burrito of left-
overs. Then Jesusita would take her baby sister into her arms and
trek back to the boardinghouse to await their mother's return in
the evening. One can only imagine her fears as she negotiated the
streets of a strange city, a hungry child carrying a hungry baby. Af-
ter six months, Pasquala had made enough money to complete the
journey to California.37
Immigration agents, however, still remained suspicious of a wo-
man unaccompanied by a man. On their next attempt to cross,
even with cash in hand, Pasquala and her family were denied a reg-
ular passport. Desperate, but not helpless, she secured a local pass-
port generally reserved for Juarez residents who worked in El Paso
and in that way she and her children crossed the border.38
Another strategy employed by women involved direct con-
frontation with immigration officers. Journalist John Reed record-
ed an incident in which a woman was queried about the contents
of her rebozo. "She slowly opened the front of her dress and an-
swered placidly: 'I don't know, senor. It may be a girl and it may be
a boy.'"39 During a Board of Special Inquiry in Nogales, Arizona,
twenty-four-year-old Trinidad Orellana refused to be intimidated as
she and her fourteen-year-old sister Beatriz attempted to join their
mother and two sisters who worked as actors at the Star Theatre in
El Paso. Perhaps aware of the suspicion with which actors were
held, Trinidad adopted a defiant stance. A portion of her testimony
follows:

ORELLANA: No, my brother is not an actor.

HEARING OFFICER: What is he?
ORELLANA: He is a mechanic.
HEARING OFFICER: What kind of mechanic?
ORELLANA: You ask him.40

Shortly after this exchange, an exasperated immigration agent de-

clared, "Do you want to answer these questions . . . or do you want
to stop right now?" Appearing as a witness, her brother Alfonso took
 Border Journeys -% 13 ^

a deferential position, emphasizing the strong transnational family

bond, his fitness as a breadwinner, and his desire for U.S. citizen-
ship. In granting the Orellana sisters admittance, the transcript re-
veals an odd rationale for Trinidad's testimony.

It was thought at first from the manner of answering that there

was something wrong . . . but the Board finally decided that she
was just ignorant or frightened. There is nothing in her appear-
ance to indicate that she is connected to the theatrical profession
or anything other than a plain seamstress as she claims to be.41

Whether Trinidad Orellana's "performance" at the hearing had

been carefully scripted or not, it seems interesting that she and her
brother articulated reverse gender expectations—she assertive, he
accommodating. As significant, immigration agents attributed her
unsettling testimony to being scared or backward rather than as a
direct challenge to their authority. Perhaps being caught off guard
worked to the sisters' advantage, for three weeks later the El Paso
office would chastise the Nogales agents for making such a hasty
decision with respect to the Orellanas.42
The Immigration Act of 1917, which included provisions for a
literacy test and a head tax, made circular migration more difficult.
Historian George Sanchez contends that these measures along
with harassment by border agents contributed to a pattern of more
permanent settlement. Especially after its passage, immigrants ar-
riving in El Paso (the Ellis Island for Mexicanos) encountered a
daunting and demeaning reception. According to Balderrama and
Rodriguez, "All immigrants, men, women, and children, were herd-
ed into crowded, examination pens. As many as five hundred to six
hundred persons were detained there for endless hours without
benefit of drinking fountains or toilet facilities." Immigrants were
also required to remove their clothing to hand over to officials for
disinfecting. They received medical examinations and were then
herded through a public bath. Associating immigrants with out-
breaks of influenza, border agents perceived themselves as acting
in the public interest, but for the the individuals undergoing such
treatment the humiliation remained a searing memory: "They
disinfected us as if we were some kind of animals." Sanchez points
out that this process was reserved only for poor migrants. Profes-
sional and elite exiles (and those who dressed to pass above their
class) could forgo the literacy test, medical examination, and pub-
lic bath.43
-$ 14 £ From Out of the Shadows

Like those who arrived from Europe and Asia, Mexican immi-
grants dreamed of "a better life." Some were propelled by fantastic
images of prosperity. Or as a verse from a popular corrido pro-
claimed, "For they told me that here the dollars were scattered
about in heaps; That there were girls and theaters/And that here
everything was good fun."44 The manufactured fantasies of Holly-
wood also appealed to adventurous young women like Elisa Silva.
Divorcing an abusive husband, Silva, her mother, and two sisters
left Maztal&n for Los Angeles with the hope of "working as extras
in the movies." However, once they arrived, they found work in dif-
ferent occupations. One sister worked as a seamstress, another at-
tended business college, and Elisa earned $20 to $30 a week as a
"dime a dance" partner in a local Mexican dance hall. Other wo-
men, like Pasquala Esparza, were not motivated by promises of
fame and fortune; survival was their goal and, for many, the agri-
cultural communities of Texas, California, and the Far West would
be their new homes.45
After the grueling journey, Pasquala and her children resided
with her sister's family in El Monte, California. Living under one
roof with her tios and her cousins, Jesusita and her mother worked
in the berry fields from February through June; then journeyed
with the relatives to the San Joaquin Valley where they would first
pick grapes, then cotton. By November, the extended family would
return to El Monte. "We didn't work November . . . December . . .
January . . . But we used to buy our sack of beans . . . and we'd get
our flour and we'd get our coffee and we'd get our rice so that we
could live on those three months we didn't work."46
It is a truism that family networks are central to American im-
migration history, but as I listened to Jesusita Torres, I wondered
how observers, like 1930s' sociologist Ruth Allen, could have miss-
ed the complexities of extended family life when they interviewed
Mexican farm workers. Indeed, Allen seemed to equate the fact
that since growers paid the wages of all the family members in a
lump sum to the head of household, such arrangements sat well
in the minds of Mexican women, whom she believed clung to "tra-
ditions of feminine subservience." With thinly veiled contempt,
Allen wrote:

The Mexican woman has been taught as her guide to conduct the
vow of the Moabitess, 'Where thou goest, I will go.' Up and down
the road she follows the men of her family. . . . The modern
Woman Movement and demands for economic independence
 Border Journeys % 15 £"

have left her untouched. Uncomplainingly, she labors in the field

for months at a time and receives as a reward from the head of the
family some gew-gaw from the five and ten cent store, or, at best,
a new dress. The supremacy of the male is seldom disputed.47

The ethnocentric perceptions of this Texas professor signifies

one end of the spectrum. On the opposite end reside rosy notions
of happy extended families. While family and fictive kin may have
eased the migrant journey and provided physical and emotional
succor, human relationships are rarely perfect. Indeed, I too may
be guilty of casting a fairly uncritical eye on extended family net-
works in Cannery Women, Cannery Lives.48 Bear in mind that the
dynamics of power permeate the realm of decision-making whether
one is situated at work or at home. We must move beyond a cele-
bration of la familia to address questions of power and patriarchy,
the gender politics of work and family.
Gender politics, however, is also enmeshed in economic and
social stratification. Women like Jesusita Torres and her mother
Pasquala lived and worked in extended family relationships often
by necessity rather than choice. It was not until Pasquala secured
employment at a walnut factory that she could save a portion of her
wages and move her daughters and grandson out of her sister and
brother-in-law's home. Although Senora Torres remembered that
"when you live together, you think that they love you and you love
them," she also revealed that her uncle's drinking took a toll on the
family. "We couldn't sleep because they had to do their singing and
their cussing . . . and we had a little corner in the kitchen where
we slept."49 Julia Luna Mount remembered her family going wal-
nut picking "with a friend of a friend." In her words, "We slept on
the floor in the living room. We suffered humiliations because
we really had no place to go ... and they made us feel very un-
welcome."50
Individual memories illuminate community histories. The fol-
lowing narrative reveals Mexican women's stories across region and
occupation, examining their lives in agricultural colonias, boxcar
barrios, and mining towns and focusing, in part, on the cultural
construction of class. Just as women's work and family roles were
intertwined, so too were the racial, economic, and patriarchal con-
straints they faced. Their legacies of resistance reveal their re-
siliency, determination, and strength.
A lifelong farm and nursery worker, Jesusita Torres stated
simply:
4 16 ^- From Out of the Shadows

It's hard when you don't have an education. You go to work and
you always have to do the hardest work. I used to think, "If I ever
have children, I'm gonna work so hard my children will NEVER
do this."51
Migrant workers, both past and present, have occupied a vulnera-
ble, precarious sector of the working class. Indeed, as an underclass
of monopoly capitalism, frequently invisible in labor camps off the
beaten track, farm workers have, in general, labored for low wages,
under hazardous conditions, and with substandard housing and
provisions. While individual qualities such as physical stamina and
fortitude seem necessary for survival, a collective sense of family,
neighborhood, and cultural bonds created thriving colonias among
Mexican agricultural workers. In Labor and Community, historian
Gilbert Gonzalez meticulously reconstructs citrus communities in
Orange County. Colonia residents may have depended on the grow-
ers for their livelihoods, but they developed their own local village
structures and organizations, ones imbued with what Emilio
Zamora has termed "an all-inclusive Mexicanist identity" rooted
in nationalism and "working class values of fraternalism, reciproc-
ity, and altruism." As Devra Weber argues in Dark Sweat, White
Gold, "Segregation, working-class status, and the geographic mo-
bility of Mexican men and women reinforced their identity as Mex-
icans ... and reaffirmed the need to rely on each other in an Anglo-
dominated society." She continued, "While aspects of mutual aid
underlie any society, the importance of reciprocity was more pow-
erful among immigrants."52
But there is more to the story than collective identity, for the
pallor of patriarchy must also be considered in exploring the lives of
women agricultural workers. Rosalinda Gonzalez contends that the
organization of farm labor reinforced patriarchal tendencies within
families. Women could labor for the patron at work and the patron
at home. However, like their foremothers who migrated north dur-
ing the frontier era, Mexicanas created their own worlds of influ-
ence predicated on women's networks, on ties of familial and fictive
kin. Commadrazgo served as one of the undergirdings for general
patterns of reciprocity as women cared for one another as family
and neighbors.53
As an example, Irene Castaneda recalled her mother's efforts as
a midwife in South Texas:
Mother, from seeing the poor people die for lack of medical at-
tention, wanted to do something to help them and she learned as
best she could, to deliver babies. Sometimes on the floor with just
 Border Journeys -% 17 $•

a small blanket. . . . Sometimes she would bring pillows or blan-

kets from home—many of the women had not eaten—she would
bring them rice from home and feed them by spoonfuls. The
shots were a cup of hot pepper tea—to give strength for the baby
to be born.54

The family remained the unit of production in agricultural la-

bor. For wives and mothers, the day began before sunrise as they
prepared the masa for fresh tortillas. In an interview with Gilbert
Gonzalez, Julia Aguirre remembered how her mother prepared tor-
tillas on top of a steel barrel that she had improvised as a stove. As
a child, Clemente Linares worked with a short-handle hoe in the
beet fields of Montana. He recalled the "double day" existence of
his mother who labored all day in the fields and returned to a full
evening of chores. After dinner, "She would work on the washing
board and tub. She had to heat the water on the stove and if there
wasn't room for the water, they would heat the water outside on a
fire." He continued, "She would spend half the night so she would
be ready to go back to work the next morning." Drawing on a 1923
Department of Labor study, sociologists Mary Romero and Eric
Margolis illuminate the double day among campesinas in the Col-
orado beet fields. "Only 14 of the 454 working mothers interviewed
were relieved by other adults in the cooking and only 42 women
were assisted by a child."55
Paid by the acre, bin, or burlap bag, workers had their earnings
tied to their abilities to pick with speed and skill, careful not to
bruise the berries or puncture the tomatoes. Mothers with infants
were not uncommon sights. Grace Luna related how women would
scale ladders with 100 pounds of cotton on their backs and "some
carried their kids on top of their picking sacks."56 While Luna
picked cotton in Madera, California, Marfa Arredondo worked in a
peach orchard little more than an hour's distance near the small
town of Delhi. Reflecting on her experiences as a young mother
coping with the realities of migrant life, she revealed:

In 1944 we camped in Delhi under trees and orchards in tents.

We made a home. We had rocks already or bricks and cooked our
food and got boxes for our table.... Martin [her son] suffered, he
remembers. Picking peaches was the hardest job—I used to cry
because my neck hurt, the big peaches were heavy. I [could] only
fill the bag half way because I couldn't stand the pain. . . . We
lived not too far [the bosses] and that is where we used to get our
water. Restrooms—they were under the trees, in the field, or by
the canal.57
-% 18 % From Out of the Shadows

Migrant farm workers had little shelter from the extremes of

heat or cold. With no labor camp in sight, Jesusita Torres dusted
herself off and slept under trees. Clemente Linares recalled how
the Montana winters would freeze the outdoor water pumps, but
the ever-present snow, which seeped into the house from the
cracks in the walls, did serve as his family's main source of water.
Telling his daughter Lydia the proverbial story of walking over two
miles to school in the snow, he declared, "That you didn't freeze to
death was a miracle."58 Conversely, in the poem "I Remember," Is-
abel Flores presents a limpid image of life in the fields on a hot
summer day. A portion follows:

I remember
riding on my mother's
sacka
as she picked cotton in the middle of two
surcos
lonches
tortillas y frijoles
in an opened field
with the dust and the wind.

I remember
watching a cloud
slowly covering the sun
and giving thanks for the minutes
of shade.59

Some children never made it to the fields. In 1938, a Michigan

newspaper reported how, in the beet fields near Blissfield, company
housing amounted to "hovels" with fifteen to twenty workers as-
signed to each shack. Babies were born "in tents or outside under
trees." One infant died shortly after birth. The mother had stood in
a crowded flatbed truck all the way from San Antonio, Texas, to
Michigan and on her arrival went into labor prematurely.60 A single
headline from a Michigan paper says it all:

Want, Poverty, Misery, Terror Ride Through Michigan Sugar

Beet Fields Like Four Horsemen
Mexican Labor Brought Like Cattle to State in
Trucks; Nameless Graves Unmarked in
Fields.61
 Border Journeys -$ 19 (£;-

Rural migrant women had few choices other than picking pro-
duce. Some became cooks in labor camps and others ran makeshift
boardinghouses. In addition to picking produce, caring for her
family, and serving as the local midwife, Irene Castaneda's mother
took in laundry for which she earned $5 per week. Working as a
housekeeper for local farm and merchant families offered another
option, but domestic labor frequently contains the hidden psycho-
logical costs of prejudice, discrimination, and humiliation.62 Paul
Taylor recorded the following observations from Euro-American
women in South Texas regarding their Mexican "servants."
They are good domestic servants if you train them right. They are
getting better and are clean if you teach them to be. . .. We feel
toward the Mexicans like the old southerners toward the Negroes.
Some of us have had servants from the same family for three
63
generations.
In the midst of a family tragedy, Jesusita Torres learned that she
definitely preferred migrant work over household employment.
At the age of fifteen, Jesusita eloped with a young man she met in
the fields and a year later became a mother. At seventeen, Jesusita,
pregnant with their second child, had been abandoned by her
twenty-four-year-old husband. Moving back in with her mother
and relatives, she packed carrots and spinach for a while, but then
tried working as a live-in housekeeper. Her mother would care for
her toddler son and newborn child. "I went to do housework and they
did not pay me too much and I had to stay there so I did not like it."
When Jesusita's baby died, her employer helped her provide a proper
burial. Senora Torres, however, learned that this assistance was
neither an act of charity nor kindness, but an advance she would
have to pay back. In her words, "That lady helped me to bury him
because I was working for her; so after I got through paying her what
I owed her then I quit." How could this patrona be so heartless?
Writing about women of color in domestic service, sociologist Eve-
lyn Nakano Glenn examines both the structural mechanism of a
"dual labor system" and the playing out of racialized/gendered iden-
tities and ideologies within the employer-employee interpersonal
interactions that characterize such work. She theorizes the actions
of employers in the following terms: "Racial characterizations effect-
ively neutralized the racial-ethnic woman's womanhood, allowing
the mistress to be 'unaware' of the domestic's relationship to her own
children and household."
^ 20 £ From Out of the Shadows

Nakano Glenn continues, "The exploitation of racial-ethnic wo-

men's physical, emotional, and mental work for the benefit of white
households thus could be rendered invisible in consciousness if not
in reality."65
Migrant women, whether they labored in the fields or someone
else's kitchen, conserved scarce familial resources within their own
households. They tended subsistence gardens and raised poultry
and other barnyard animals. At times, grandparents and chil-
dren assumed responsibility for the herbs, vegetables, and chick-
ens. Clemente Linares remembers helping his eighty-six-year-old
grandfather around the yard. "We raised tomatoes, peas, beans,
cabbage, carrots . . . in order to have a root cellar . . . to help pro-
vide us through the winter. . . . And of course, we tried to have a hog
or two to butcher, maybe a calf, and . . . we had our chickens." Such
activities lessened dependence on local merchants and the com-
pany store. As Sarah Deutsch has argued, such a mixed economy
enabled Hispanos in New Mexico and Colorado a measure of inde-
pendence.66 Yet, once they left the land, they lost that indepen-
dence. Romero and Margolis explained that when these farmers
"left their dry land farms in southern Colorado or northern New
Mexico to answer the call of the growers and the sugar beet com-
panies it was a critical step in their transformation from peasant
farmers to wage workers." They continue, "By the end of the de-
pression the dignity of wage work had been wrested from them and
they had been reduced to underemployed wards of the state."67
Whether underemployed, unemployed, or even employed, put-
ting food on the table was a full-time occupation, especially during
the Depression. In California fields, migrant farm workers of all
ethnicities (Euro-American, African American, Filipino, and Mexi-
can) lived on the brink of starvation. John Steinbeck described a
typical diet in good times as "beans, baking powder biscuits, jam,
coffee," and, in bad, "dandelion greens and boiled potatoes." Simi-
larly, Maria Arredondo recalled, "We didn't have enough food. We
had beans, very little meat mixed with potatoes and sopa."68 In her
article on the San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike of 1933, Devra We-
ber tellingly points to the importance of food in women's daily lives
with memories of want indelibly etched in their consciousness.
"Men remembered the strike in terms of wages and conditions;
women remembered the events in terms of food."69
For some, resistance to exploitation took the form of labor ac-
tivism; for others, escape seemed the only option. A single case
study taken from INS records can serve to show fortitude and
courage. It concerns over 150 Mexican immigrants recruited to
 Border Journeys -% 21 £

pick sugar beets by the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company only to find

that management failed to abide by the terms of their contracts and
the recruited immigrants were left to fend for themselves without
coal or food in the bleak Idaho winter. As mentioned earlier, one of
the workers, Severiano Rodriguez, had appealed to the Mexican
ambassador to intervene on their behalf. In addition, a local priest
brought their plight to the county commissioners who authorized
the distribution of 1,000 pounds of flour and one ton of coal as well
as a relief allotment of $165 to be divided among sixteen of the
neediest families. The county commission then sought compensa-
tion from the sugar beet firm. A subsequent Immigration Service
investigation absolved the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company from any
wrongdoing. Referring to company representatives as "intelligent
and capable men," the investigating agent believed that incidences
of suffering had been "exaggerated." In a classic example of scape-
goating, he chastised Mexicanos for not bringing along the proper
clothes and bedding for an Idaho winter and not saving enough of
their wages to carry them through to spring. Although he realized
that the workers would be charged for such supplies, he seemed be-
wildered that they turned down company offers of blankets and
mattresses. The migrants had already accumulated substantial
debt, beginning with company charges for transportation to Idaho,
and, though in great want, they were determined to avoid further
employer claims to their labor. During the investigation, the Utah-
Idaho Sugar Beet Company also made assurances that the Mexican
immigrants would henceforth receive adequate supplies of food
and fuel. Although the local government had donated some provi-
sions, Mexicans were not welcome as they were perceived as carri-
ers of influenza and even the Immigration Service acknowledged
that at least seven migrants had succumbed to the epidemic.70
Having little recourse and probably fewer resources, thirty-two
people—men, women, and children—gathered their belongings
and fled the labor camp. Like the African-American slaves who
took a chance on the Underground Railroad, these Mexicano im-
migrants (twenty-one were members of a single extended family,
the Betancourts) made a desperate break for freedom. Behaving
like a modern-day planter, the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company ap-
pealed to immigration authorities for assistance in apprehending
those whom the firm perceived as breaking their contracts with
their feet. Labeling them deserters, a company official wrote, "I un-
derstand that some of the people are in Pocatello, Idaho, but have
reason to believe some of them have gone to Elko, Nevada."71
Resistance to economic exploitation could also take the form of
i£ 22 £ From Out of the Shadows

ethnic community building. In the citrus belt of southern Califor-

nia, Mexican immigrants established colonias or villages complete
with their own organizations and institutions. Forming patriotic as-
sociations, mutual aid groups, church societies, and baseball
teams, Mexican immigrants created a rich, semiautonomous life
for themselves. In historian Gilbert Gonzalez's words, "The village
was home, neighborhood, playground, and social center." The
length of the citrus season promoted the development of Orange
County colonias and Riverside barrios. With employment available
in the groves eight months out of the year, citrus workers had a spa-
tial stability in contrast to transient or contract labor. During the
off-season (late summer, early fall), citrus families would often
make the migrant circuit north picking grapes and cotton in the
San Joaquin Valley or perhaps heading southeast to the rich agri-
cultural fields near Coachella. However, they had a home and
community awaiting their return.72 For Eusebia Vasquez de Buriel,
Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine has been at the center of her life for
over sixty years. She recalled how the Mexican neighbors chipped
in to build their own church in the middle of the Depression. "We
worked real hard to have our church . . . the people were all poor,
worst than we are now, but everything came up real nice, so we are
very proud of ... that church." Citrus communities represented a
collective identity and a sense of belonging for its members or, as
Gilbert Gonzalez stated, within these villages, workers "con-
structed their vision of a good society."73
Conditions of migrant life were not confined to agricultural la-
bor. Railroad workers and their families traveled from one boxcar
barrio to another. While men went off to the tracks, women en-
deavored to make the boxcar a home and to nurture ties with their
neighbors. When newcomers arrived in Helen, New Mexico, for ex-
ample, women met the crew trains offering their assistance to the
passengers. Frederica Vasquez recalled to her grandson Ray Buriel
how "las senoras . . . went out to meet them and brought them food
and brought them clothing and made them feel very welcome."74
According to historian Jeffrey Garcilazo, "Boxcar communities
probably represented the most common form of housing for Mexi-
can workers and their families."75 Some were "rolling villages" in
that families traveled with their particular shelters while other set-
tlements were composed of boxcars with the wheels removed. The
company provided wood-burning stoves and at times outdoor sani-
tation facilities. However, one Kansas man stated that the out-
house only had two seats for thirty people. Given the isolation of
many of these settlements, families often had little choice but to
 Border Journeys •% 23 %

buy their staples from the company commissary. Like the contract
laborers employed by the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, track fami-
lies could become entangled in a web of debt peonage. Noting
the high prices charged by the company store, the wife of a South-
ern Pacific rail worker, Juana Calderon, declared, "We cannot save
any money . . . always in debt so we will probably always stay with
the . . . Company."76
As in the case of farm workers, subsistence gardens and barn-
yard animals could ease reliance on the company store as well as
provide fresh produce, dairy products, and meat. Women and chil-
dren tended the chickens and goats, pulled weeds, and nurtured
seedlings.77 One can only imagine their frustration if their hus-
bands were transferred to another section as they gathered their
belongings and livestock, leaving the gardens for other families to
harvest.
A single boxcar often housed more than one family, generally
two, sometimes more. Families sweltered in the Arizona heat and
shivered in an Illinois winter. Referring to the railroad settlement
of Silvis, Illinois, a Reader's Digest article related: "When the Mex-
icans in their boxcars woke up in the wintertime, children had to
break ice in the washbowls before they could clean up for
school."78 Health care, moreover, was a vital concern. People fre-
quently relied on euros, those in the community with knowledge of
traditional medicine. Doctors and hospitals were not readily acces-
sible. Frederica Vasquez would lose two daughters in Silvis, one to
whooping cough and another to pneumonia.79
Railroad wives, like migrant workers, could also find making
ends meet a difficult proposition. To supplement their spouses' in-
comes, they took in sewing, laundry, boarders, even babies. Some
women earned money or food for their families by wet-nursing
neighborhood infants. As Gregoria Sosa, a railroad worker's wife
from Colton, California, recounted:

I bore three children and did washing and ironing for some of my
neighbors. Sometimes I was also a wet nurse. I was very sad once
when one of my "criados"—a child I breast fed was taken from my
breast because his father did not want to pay me any longer. The
baby died of hunger not much later. They tried to have him suck
on a goat teat. I would have fed him without money, for a little
food to help my little ones.80

Seeking some measure of economic security, railroad workers

in Silvis, Illinois, "saved enough money to buy land that no else
-$24 & From Out of the Shadows

wanted at the west end of town." These men had relatively stable
jobs in the repair shop of the Rock Island Railroad.81 After years of
migrating on the Rock Island rails, Felix Vasquez would also secure
employment as a bolt maker at the Silvis plant and for ten years he
and his family would call Silvis home. Recalling the close-knit na-
ture of the community, his daughter Eusebia stated, "Most people
were real nice, they called [each other] los compadres." She further
explained that during the influenza epidemic of 1918, her father
organized a food drive to assist his afflicted neighbors. "My father
used to have a little wagon and every week, he used to go to every
house and pick up food . . . to help the sick people."82
Mutual aid proved a cornerstone in the process of settlement
among Mexican workers in the United States. It should be noted
that not everyone participated in this sense of reciprocity, as evi-
dent in Gregoria Sosa's narrative. However, like the frontier women
described by Fabiola Cabeza de Baca in We Fed Them Cactus,83
Mexicanas, whether in migrant camps, boxcar barrios, or mining
towns, sought to exercise some control over their lives, often rely-
ing on one another for material and emotional support.
The cultural construction of class can be discerned in the min-
ing communities of southern Arizona and southern Colorado. Both
locales had a mixed economy—mining towns next to villages with
ranches and homesteads marking the landscape. In Songs My
Mother Sang to Me, Patricia Preciado Martin presents the oral nar-
ratives of ten Arizona women, women whose memories elucidate
the division of labor within families as well as the layering of gen-
erations within a regional matrix. Furthermore, Martin's narrators
demonstrate how women claimed a public space through expres-
sions of religious faith.84
Typical of working-class Mexican and Mexican-American
households, the family served as the locus of production. Whether
from a ranching or mining family, daughters were expected to per-
form a round of arduous chores. The labor of female kin, regardless
of age, proved instrumental in ensuring the family's economic sur-
vival. Women preserved food for the winter, sold surplus commodi-
ties to neighbors, did laundry for Euro-American employers, and
provided homes for lodgers. Like their pioneer foremothers, they
also herded livestock, milked cows, built fences, and harvested
crops. A strict division of labor according to gender became
blurred. Yet this seemingly egalitarian assignment of tasks in no
way subverted the traditional notion of "woman's place." Before
the break of dawn, Rosalia Salazar and her sisters would rise to
 Border Journeys -^j 25 (£;-

gather kindling, milk the cows, and afterwards walk several miles
to school, a routine that began with serving their father a cup of
coffee.
With fortitude, faith, and unsung courage, single mothers relied
on their domestic skills to feed their children. Julia Yslas Velez
recalled how her mother, who came from a middle-class back-
ground in Mexico, peddled her handmade garments to "poor"
Mexicanos. "She did not have a formal education, but she was
very smart. She had a little book.... She used to mark in it what
people owed her. She would draw a circle for a dollar and a half
circle for fifty cents." Across Arizona and the Southwest, women
participated in the informal economy in various ways—lodging
single miners in Superior, Arizona, selling pan dulce door to
door in San Bernardino, or swapping sex for food in El Paso.
Some relied on their healing skills. As cumndems (healers) and
parteras (midwives), Mexican women nurtured the networks es-
sential for claiming a place in the United States.
A layering of generations and peoples characterized rural Arizona.
Mexicano migrants from Sonora homesteaded alongside Mexican
Americans. Marriages occurred across generational and racial lines.
Boardinghouses brought people together. At Josefa's Boarding
House in Superior, for instance, a young Sonoran miner success-
fully courted Josefa's Arizona-born daughter. The oral histories
in Songs My Mother Sang to Me reveal a multiracial agrarian society.
As an example, Rosalia Salazar was the child of a Mexican mother
and a "full-blooded Opata Indian" father. She married Wilford
Whelan, whose mother, Ignacia, was Mexicana.87 In the center of
this multiracial society was a distinctive Mexican-American agrarian
culture, one that incorporated those willing to partake of it.
Some "Americanos" attended fiestas, dances, and religious pageants.
Assimilation was not a one-way street. In southern Arizona, assimi-
lation seemed to be thrown in reverse. Intermarriage did not
guarantee the anglicization of the region's Spanish-speaking peoples.
"Many of the offspring of Mexican-Anglo unions emphasized
their Mexican rather than their Anglo heritage," observed historian
Thomas Sheridan. "The reasons they did so testify to the en-
during strength of Mexican society in the face of Anglo political
and economic hegemony."88 One also has to take into account the
class bridge, with Mexican-Euro-American intermarriage occurring
among those who owned property. The voices represented
in Songs point to an expansive Mexican cultural horizon in sou-
thern Arizona where one's "positionality" or identity rested not in some
$ 26 $- From Out of the Shadows

essentialist biological mooring but through acceptance and adop-

tion of Mexican cultural values and expectations.
Yet southern Arizona was a stratified society complete with seg-
regated schools and clearly demarcated "American" and "Mexican"
sides of mining towns. "I'll admit there was a lot of discrimination
in those years," declared Carlotta Silvas Martin as she recalled
growing up as a miner's daughter. In Mascot, Dolores Montoya
opened a boardinghouse in the Euro-American section of the town.
Decades later, her daughter Esperanza would vividly recount the
fear she felt as she, her recently widowed mother, and her siblings
were forced to abandon the family-run boardinghouse in the face
of systematic terror and harassment. In the dark of night, someone
kept turning the doorknob and separating the vines from the win-
dow. Reaching a point of desperation, the family fled with only
their clothing "After we left, whoever it was did a good job of rob-
bing us. They took everything—dishes, jewelry, furniture—any-
thing of value, even the santos."89
Women relied on one another and on their faith. Religious
practices permeated everyday routines. In preparing the masa for
the tortillas, Maria del Carmen Trejo de Gastelum "would always
add salt to the flour in the form of la Santa Cruz (the Holy Cross)—
para bendecir la masa (to bless the dough)." With regard to edu-
cation, the convent of the Sisters of the Company of Mary in Dou-
glas, Arizona, served as a bulwark against the Americanizing in-
fluences of a mining town. The nuns became teachers of both cat-
echism and custom.90 Church jamaicas, saints' days, and Mexican
patriotic holidays constituted an integral part of Arizona's Mexican-
American agrarian culture. Recalling the celebration of "Las Po-
sadas," Carlotta Silvas Martin observed:

Las Posadas are a reenactment of the travels of Joseph and Mary

who are looking for shelter before the birth of Jesus. Large groups
of men, women, and children walked in procession thorough the
darkened streets carrying candles.... We'd arrive at a designated
house and sing songs asking for posada or lodging . . . those inside
would answer that there was no room. We'd go to several houses
until we arrived at a chosen house. . . . Then we'd go in and have
food—chocolate and pan de huevo . . . and a pinata full of
candy.91

Las Posadas reaffirmed the practice of ritualized visiting among kin

and friends; it seemed as much a celebration of community net-
works as a religious journey. From a small home altar nestled atop
 Border Journeys -^j 27 (£;-

a bureau dresser to a well-orchestrated town play or pageant,

Mexicans in southern Arizona viewed their own interpretations
of Catholicism as integral parts of their cultural life. Women
also carved out a public cultural space in these community-
based religious productions.
Women's daily lives appear to corroborate Richard White's
observation on the cultural construction of class. "A self-conscious
working class demands not just common labor, but also a common
sense of identity, a common set of interests, and a common set
of values." Arguing that "ethnic solidarity often seemed more
important than working class solidarity," White maintained that
Western mining towns "often seemed a collection of separate
ethnic working-class communities whose overarching class con-
sciousness was tentative and fragile when it existed at all."
While racial/cultural boundaries could blur in Arizona's agrar-
ian communities, in southern Colorado, ethnic boundaries appear
relatively fixed, with racial/class divisions cropping up even within
groups of Spanish-speaking workers. Born in Walsenberg, Colo-
rado, in 1921, Erminia Ruiz was considered the daughter of a
"mixed marriage"—her father was a Mexican immigrant, her
mother a Hispana born in nearby Trinidad. She remembered
that Mexican union families (those associated with the Industrial
Workers of the World) tended to stick together. On Saturday
night, they would gather at someone's house for music, food,
dancing, and fellowship. "All the neighbors got together. You'd
have dancing and they put all the chairs out... and the ladies
would bake pies and cakes." During the Columbine Strike of
1927, Erminia had little contact with her mother's side of the
family as her uncles were scabs. "We were in a way closer to our
neighbors." She also remembered attending union meetings with
her father, sitting on his knee and listening to all the languages
spoken around her. There, she learned to sing her first song in
English—"Solidarity Forever." Her personal story correlates well
with Sarah Deutsch's analysis of the ways in which ethnic and
regional identities in New Mexico and Colorado reconfigure class
94
consciousness within separate communities.
Whether they lived in a camp, village, or city, Mexican women
carved a place for themselves and their families based on shared
experiences, cultural traditions, histories, and concerns. They relied
on one another as family members and as neighbors whether
they lived in a tightly knit rural colonia or a rolling boxcar barrio. Yet,
as we have seen, patriarchy and even class distinctions existed; fami-
•f 28 $- From Out of the Shadows

lies could be source of strength or a source of trial. But the range

of their lives and their struggles seemed lost on the American pub-
lic. Growing nativist sentiment during the 1920s and 1930s began
to blame Mexican immigrants for society's ills.
A Mexican "expert" from Vanderbilt University, Dr. Roy Garis
testified before a U.S. congressional committee. He reiterated the
views of a Euro-American Westerner, a man who claimed that Mex-
ican women were instinctively prone to adultery. Relaying this
questionable third-party testimony, Garis recapitulated the tired,
trite, and grotesque nineteenth-century gendered, racialized
stereotypes for a modern audience.94 A portion follows:

Their minds run to nothing higher than animal functions—eat,

sleep, and sexual debauchery. In every huddle of Mexican shacks
one meets the same idleness . . . filthy children with faces plas-
tered with flies, diseases, lice . . . apathetic peons and lazy
squaws.95

These sentiments were not isolated, extremist meanderings.

With a circulation of nearly three million, The Saturday Evening
Post ran a series of articles urging the restriction of Mexican im-
migration. The titles tell the story: "The Mexican Invasion," "Wet
and Other Mexicans," and "The Alien on Relief." One article, "The
Docile Mexican," characterized Mexicano immigrants with the
following adjectives: "illiterate, diseased, pauperized." Relying on
mixed metaphors as well as the opinions of scientists who dabbled
in eugenics, the author Kenneth Roberts refers to Mexicans as
both "white elephants" and as people who bring "countless num-
bers of American citizens into the world with the reckless prodigal-
ity of rabbits." Roberts cautions against "the mongrelization of
America," warning further that the children of Mexican and Euro-
American parents will result in "another mixed race problem; and
as soon as a race is mixed, it is inferior."96 And under the heading
of "The Mexican Conquest," the editor of The Saturday Evening
Post offered his opinion in the June 22, 1929 issue:

The very high Mexican birth rate tends to depress still further the
low white birth rate. Thus a race problem of the greatest magni-
tude is being allowed to develop for future generations to regret
and in spite of the fact that the Mexican Indian is considered a
most undesirable ethnic stock for the melting pot.97
 Border Journeys % 29 £

With the onset of the Great Depression, rhetoric exploded into

action. Between 1931 to 1934, an estimated one-third of the Mex-
ican population in the United States (over 500,000 people) were
either deported or repatriated to Mexico even though the majority
were native U.S. citizens. Mexicans were the only immigrants tar-
geted for removal. Proximity to the Mexican border, the physical
distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios influ-
enced immigration and social welfare officials to focus their efforts
solely on the Mexican people, people whom they viewed as both
foreign usurpers of American jobs and as unworthy burdens on re-
lief rolls. From Los Angeles, California, to Gary, Indiana, Mexicans
were either summarily deported by immigration agencies or per-
suaded to depart voluntarily by duplicitous social workers who
greatly exaggerated the opportunities awaiting them south of the
border.98 In the words of George Sanchez,

As many as seventy-five thousand Mexicans from southern Cali-

fornia returned to Mexico by 1932. . . . The enormity of these fig-
ures, given the fact that California's Mexican population was
in 1930 slightly over three hundred and sixty thousand . . . indi-
cates that almost every Mexican family in southern California
confronted in one way or another the decision of returning or
staying."

Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez place the de-

portation and repatriation figures even higher. Drawing on statis-
tics from both U.S. and Mexican government agencies as well as
newspaper reports, they contend that one million Mexicanos were
repatriated or deported during the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover,
they note "that approximately 60 percent . . . were children who
had been born in the United States."100
The methods of departure varied. A historian of Los Angeles,
Douglas Monroy, recounts how la migra trolled the barrio in a "dog
catcher's wagon." In one instance, immigration agents tore a Los
Angeles woman from her home in the early morning hours, threw
her in the wagon, and then left her toddler screaming on the front
porch.101 Even if such scenes were few and far between, they cer-
tainly invoked fear among Mexicanos, many of whom decided to
take the county up on its offer of free train fare. Carey McWilliams
described those boarding a repatriation train as "men, women, and
children—with dogs, cats, and goats . .. [with] half-open suitcases,
-$ 30 % From Out of the Shadows

rolls of bedding, and lunch baskets."102 Thousands more chose to

leave by automobile. They piled all their possessions—mattresses,
furniture, clothing—into a jalopy and headed south. This scene of
auto caravans making their way into the interior of Mexico offers a
curious parallel to the ensuing Dust Bowl or "Okie" migration into
California.103
Losing one child and struggling to support the other, Jesusita
Torres held on to her place in the United States. She refused to ap-
ply for relief because she and her mother wanted to escape the no-
tice of government authorities. "My mother said it was no use for
us to [go] back . . . to what? We did not have anything out there."
Describing the repatriation of two friends, she further remarked,
"We were sorry that they left, because both of the ladies the hus-
bands left them [in Mexico] with their children. It was pretty hard
for them." Jesusita survived the Depression by picking berries and
string beans around Los Angeles and following the crops in the San
Joaquin Valley. From her wages, she raised a family and bought a
house, one she purchased for seventeen dollars.104
Petra Sanchez had no choice. By the fall of 1933, Petra and
Ramon appear to have built a nice life for themselves in Buena
Park. With the money from berry picking and manure hauling com-
bined with Petra's frugal budgeting, the couple had leased a small
ranch. From 1926 to 1933, their family grew from four children to
ten.105 According to Marjorie Sanchez-Walker,

Even with a new baby arriving every fifteen months, Petra still
found the time to supplement the family's needs from her indus-
try. Chicken provided eggs and meat that she could sell when
there was a surplus; her garden produced vegetables; she made
cheeses which hung . . . over the dining room table; and in the
summer, she picked berries for wages.106

Petra found she could not keep up this pace. In November 1933,
she suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to the Nor-
walk State Mental Hospital.107
By Christmas, Petra, her health seemingly restored, would be
home with her family again, but home now was her childhood vil-
lage of San Julian. Coming under the scrutiny of relief authorities,
Ramon believed that if the family left voluntarily, they could return
at a later date. However, his papers bore the stamp: "LOS ANGELES
COUNTY/DEPARTMENT OF CHARITIES/COUNTY WELFARE DEPARTMENT."
The family now bore the onus of "liable to become a public charge"
 Border Journeys 4 31 £-

and thus "ineligible for readmission." "Repatriation, therefore,

amounted to deportation for Petra and Ramon."108
In 1935, hoping to return to California, the couple and their
eleven children, with another on the way, traveled to Ciudad
Juarez. They were turned away at the border. With money running
low, Ramon "shaved his moustache, borrowed money for a second-
hand suit and with his green eyes and fair-skin, simply walked
across the border." He planned to earn enough money picking ber-
ries in Buena Park to secure his family's clandestine passage to the
United States. The children supported the family—the boys by
shining shoes, selling trinkets, and "lagging pennies"; and the girls
by running errands for neighbors. Six-year-old Juan acted as a "tour
guide" for U.S. army personnel on the prowl for a good time in the
Red Light District and for his labor received tips from both soldiers
and prostitutes.109
The deprivation in Ciudad Juarez was well known. The New
York Times carried a story of how over twenty repatriates had died
"from pneumonia and exposure." Without resources or shelter, "as
many as 2,000 lived in a large open corral."110 With hunger a con-
stant companion, Petra gave birth to a daughter Catalina, but the
infant would die in Juarez fifteen months later, her coffin hand-
made by her brother Librado. Petra held her children together un-
der the most adverse circumstances. In 1937, the family was re-
united in California; but Ramon and Petra would never regain the
level of financial security they had known living on their leased
Buena Park ranch.111
After 1934, the deportation and repatriation campaigns dimin-
ished, but the effects of the Depression, segregation, and eco-
nomic segmentation remained. Even members of the middle-class
Mexican-American community were not immune. During the
1930s and 1940s, the League of United Latin American Citizens
(LULAC) led the fight for school desegregation in the courts. At
the household level, maintaining appearances proved important.
With no money for coal, Eduardo Araiza, who owned a small auto
repair shop in El Paso, brought home rubber tires to burn in the
fireplace. As his daughter Alma related, "You kept up appearances
even though your stomach grumbled."112
The border journeys of Mexican women were fraught with un-
foreseen difficulties, but held out the promises of a better life. In
the words of one Mexicana, "Here woman has come to have a place
like a human being."113 Women built communities of resiliency,
drawing strength from their comadres, their families, and their
% 32 £ From Out of the Shadows

faith. Confronting "America" often mean confronting the labor

contractor, the boss, the landlord, or la migra. It could also involve
negotiating the settlement house, the grammar school, and the
health clinic. State and church-sponsored Americanization pro-
jects could portend cultural hegemony, individual empowerment,
vocational tracking, community service, or all four simultaneously.
To get at how Mexicanas and their children traversed the terrain of
Americanization in negotiating institutions and ideologies, a case
study seems appropriate. The Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement
House in El Paso, Texas, emphasized "Christian Americanization"
while furnishing social services denied Mexicans in the public sec-
tor. A historical survey of this Methodist settlement reveals much
about how women, especially as mothers and daughters, claimed
portions of Americanization within their own cultural frames.
 1
£L

Confronting "America"

As a child Elsa Chavez confronted a "moral" dilemma. She wanted

desperately to enjoy the playground equipment close to her home
in El Paso's Segundo Barrio. The tempting slide, swings, and jungle
gym seemed to call her name. However, her mother would not let
her near the best playground (and for many years the only play-
ground) in the barrio. Even a local priest warned Elsa and her
friends that playing there was a sin—the playground was located
within the yard of the Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement, a Meth-
odist community center.'
While one group of Americans responded to Mexican immigra-
tion by calling for restriction and deportation, other groups
mounted campaigns to "Americanize" the immigrants. From Los
Angeles, California, to Gary, Indiana, state and religious-sponsored
Americanization programs swung into action. Imbued with the ide-
ology of "the melting pot," teachers, social workers, and religious
missionaries envisioned themselves as harbingers of salvation and
civilization.2 Targeting women and especially children, the van-
guard of Americanization placed their trust "in the rising genera-
tion." As Pearl Ellis of the Covina City schools explained in her
1929 publication, Americanization Through Home-making, "Since
the girls are potential mothers and homemakers, they will control,
in a large measure, the destinies of their future families." She con-
tinued, "It is she who sounds the clarion call in the campaign for
better homes."3

33
^ 34 & From Out of the Shadows

A growing body of literature on Americanization in Mexican

communities by such scholars as George Sanchez, Sarah Deutsch,
Gilbert Gonzalez, and myself suggest that church and secular pro-
grams shared common course offerings and curricular goals. Per-
haps taking their cue from the regimen developed inside Progres-
sive Era settlement houses, Americanization projects emphasized
classes in hygiene, civics, cooking, language, and vocational educa-
tion (e.g., sewing and carpentry). Whether seated at a desk in a
public school or on a sofa at a Protestant or Catholic neighborhood
house, Mexican women received similar messages of emulation
and assimilation. While emphasizing that the curriculum should
meet "the needs of these people," one manual proclaimed with
deepest sincerity that a goal of Americanization was to enkindle "a
greater respect. . . for our civilization."4
Examples of Americanization efforts spanned the Southwest
and Midwest from secular settlements in Watts, Pasadena, and
Riverside to Hull House in Chicago. In addition, Catholic neigh-
borhood centers, such as Friendly House in Phoenix, combined
Americanization programs with religious and social services. Prot-
estant missionaries, furthermore, operated an array of settlements,
health clinics, and schools. During the first half of the twentieth
century, the Methodist Church sponsored one hospital, four board-
ing schools, and sixteen settlements/community centers, all serving
a predominately Mexican clientele. Two of these facilities were lo-
cated in California, two in Kansas, one in New Mexico, and sixteen
in Texas.5 Though there are many institutions to compare, an
overview, by its very nature, would tend to privilege missionary
labors and thus, once again, place Mexican women within the
shadows of history. By taking a closer look at one particular pro-
ject—the Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement—one can discern the
attitudes and experiences of Mexican women themselves. This
chapter explores the ways in which Mexican mothers and their
children interacted with the El Paso settlement, from utilizing se-
lected services to claiming "American" identities, from taking their
babies to the clinic for immunizations to becoming missionaries
themselves.
Using institutional records raises a series of important method-
ological questions. How can missionary reports, pamphlets, news-
letters, and related documents illuminate the experiences and atti-
tudes of women of color? How do we sift through the bias, the
self-congratulation, and the hyperbole to gain insight into women's
lives? What can these materials tell us of women's agencies within
 Confronting "America" ^ 35 ^

and against larger social structures? I am intrigued (actually ob-

sessed is a better word) with questions involving decision-making,
specifically with regard to acculturation. What have Mexican
women chosen to accept or reject? How have the economic, social,
and political environments influenced the acceptance or rejection
of cultural messages that emanate from the Mexican community,
from U.S. popular culture, from Americanization programs, and
from a dynamic coalescence of differing and at times oppositional
cultural forms? What were women's real choices and, to borrow
from Jiirgen Habermas, how did they move "within the horizon of
their lifeworld"?6 Obviously, no set of institutional records can pro-
vide substantive answers, but by exploring these documents
through the framework of these larger questions, we place Mexican
women at the center of our study, not as victims of poverty and su-
perstition as so often depicted by missionaries, but as women who
made choices for themselves and for their families.
As the Ellis Island for Mexican immigrants, El Paso seemed a
logical spot for a settlement house. In 1900, El Paso's Mexican
community numbered only 8,748 residents, but by 1930 this pop-
ulation had swelled to 68,476. Over the course of the twentieth
century, Mexicans composed over one-half the total population of
this bustling border city.7 Perceived as cheap labor by Euro-Ameri-
can businessmen, they provided the human resources necessary for
the city's industrial and commercial growth. Education and eco-
nomic advancement proved illusory as segregation in housing,
employment, and schools served as constant reminders of their
second-class citizenship. To cite an example of stratification, from
1930 to 1960, only 1.8 percent of El Paso's Mexican workforce
held high white-collar occupations.8
Segundo Barrio or South El Paso has served as the center of
Mexican community life. Today, as in the past, wooden tenements
and crumbling adobe structures house thousands of Mexicanos
and Mexican Americans alike. For several decades, the only consis-
tent source of social services in Segundo Barrio was the Rose Gre-
gory Houchen Settlement House and its adjacent health clinic and
hospital.
Founded in 1912 on the corner of Tays and Fifth in the heart of
the barrio, this Methodist settlement had two initial goals: (1) pro-
vide a Christian roominghouse for single Mexicana wage earners
and (2) open a kindergarten for area children. By 1918, Houch-
en offered a full schedule of Americanization programs—citizen-
ship, cooking, carpentry, English instruction, Bible study, and Boy
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 APPENDIX.

After Thomas Bewick retired from business in favour of his son, he

continued, till his death, to employ himself closely, at home, in
filling-up gaps in his History of British Birds; and, in conjunction with
his son, he also commenced a History of British Fishes. The finished
specimens of these, on the wood, are now for the first time
published in this Memoir. A portion of a series of appropriate
Vignettes, also executed by him for the work on Fishes, are now
employed as embellishments in the preceding pages. About twenty
of the set, together with six new birds, were printed in the last
edition of the History of Birds. It may be proper to add, that the late
Robert Elliot Bewick left about fifty highly-finished and accurately-
coloured drawings of fishes from nature, together with a portion of
the descriptive matter relating to the work.
 BRITISH FISHES.

BASSE.
(Perca Labrax.—Linnæus.)
 FIFTEEN-SPINED STICKLEBACK.
(Gasterosteus spinachia.—Linnæus.)
 BREAM.
(Sparus Raii.—Bloch.)
 JOHN DORY.
(Zeus faber.—Linnæus.)
 BLACK GOBY.
(Gobius niger.—Linnæus.)
 BALLAN WRASSE.
(Ballan Wrasse.—Pennant.)
 BARBEL.
(Cyprinus barbus.—Linnæus.)
 GUDGEON.
(Cyprinus gobio.—Linnæus.)
 TENCH.
(Cyprinus Tinca.—Bloch.)
 DACE OR DARE.
(Cyprinus leuciscus.—Bloch.)
 SAURY.
(Esox Saurus.—Pennant.)
 GAR FISH.
(Esox Belone.—Linnæus.)
SAMLET OR BRANDLING.
(Salmo Fario.—Linnæus.)
 LUMP SUCKER.
(Cyclopterus lumpus.—Linnæus.)
 DOG FISH.
(Squalus Acanthias.—Linnæus.)
 THE MAIGRE.
(SCIÆNA AQUILA.—Cuvier.)
 WEEVER.
(Trachinus draco.—Pennant.)
 THE ALARM.[42]
The hollow grumblings of the devils on earth having reached the
infernal regions, Satan ordered an enquiry immediately to be made
into the cause of their outcry, and commanded a trio of his choicest
associates forthwith to fly with the velocity of light to see, and to
report to him, what was the matter. On their arrival on earth, they
were met, during the night, when men were asleep, by a deputation
selected from innumerable hosts of imps from every kingdom and
state of the uncivilized as well as the civilized world. They soon were
given to understand, that an outrageous mutiny, amounting to
rebellion, had been going on for some time against their old king,
Ignorance, who was accused of having become very remiss and
negligent of his duty. For this they resolved to have him hurled from
his high station, and to have another ruler appointed in his stead. It
was alleged that, owing to his neglect, mankind had lately begun to
use their intellectual faculties to such a degree, that it was feared, if
they were suffered to go on, Satan would (though very unjustly) lay
the blame on them for the loss of his subjects. Old Ignorance was
immediately brought to judgment, and at the same time other
candidates for his office offered their services to succeed him. The
voting instantly took place, and was decided in the twinkling of an
eye, when it was found that old Ignorance was re-elected by a great
majority; for, on casting up the votes, they stood thus:—

PRINCIPALS. SATELLITES. IMPS.

{ Vanity. }
Ignorance. { Superstition. } 300,000,000.
{ Sensuality. }

{ Arrogance. }
Pride. { Envy. } 100,000,000.
{ Obstinacy. }
 { Blasphemy. }

{ Revenge. }
Malice. { Injustice. } 100,000,000.
{ Cruelty. }
Majority for old 200,000,000
Ignorance

The candidates who had lately contended with him in aspiring to

supreme command, having been appointed his chief ministers, he
was sworn to redouble his vigilence: in return for which it was finally
decreed that he should, in future, have seven links added to his tail,
and his head adorned with six horns, instead of two. His infernal
honour being thus pledged, the work of mischief was instantly
begun, by his commanding his ministers and their satellites to
redouble their vigilence, by throwing the mists of ignorance over the
minds of the rulers and teachers of mankind, and to fill their minds
with superstition, bigotry, pride, and arrogant zeal. All the imps of
minor consideration were also ordered to direct the unreasoning,
lazy, envious, wicked, gross, vulgar herd of mankind, high and low,
into the paths which lead to misery. Having thus concluded their
mission, the innumerable host set off, like a whirlwind, amidst the
glare of lightning and the roar of thunder, to take up their abode in
the minds of men, where they had been nursed before; but millions
of their number, who had been dismissed from the minds of good
men, dropped behind, and, in their fall through endless space, by
the violence of their motion, ignited, were whirled into balls of fire,
and gravitated to the sun. The rest proceeded; their numbers
eclipsed the moon, and the effluvia which exhaled from them in their
flight caused plague, pestilence, and famine in the countries they
passed over, and the concussion they made in the air is said to have
shaken the ices from the poles.
 APPLICATION.
If there be a plurality of devils, Ignorance must be their king; and
through his influence only men are wicked; and, under him and his
satellites, the wretchedness they have dealt out to mankind ever
since their chequered reign began has disfigured the fair face of
nature; and they have too often succeeded, in the struggles
between virtue and vice, in obscuring the reasoning powers of man,
and bringing him down to the level of the brute. For no sooner was
it decreed by Omnipotence that his reasoning creatures should live
in a state of civilized society, suitable to their natures and befitting
so high a behest, than these enemies to this good order of things
obtruded themselves upon it, and have too long and too often
succeeded in baffling the efforts of good men in their aims at
approaching towards perfection, and in thwarting the progress of
mental improvement, and the consequent happiness of the human
race. They have, with the glimmering light of their ignis fatuus, led
their devotees in zig-zag, backward and forward paths, through
misty bogs and quagmires, into the midnight glooms and chaotic
darkness which envelope their wretched dens. The bloody pages of
history have in part recorded some of the many miseries which have
from time to time been inflicted upon their victims; but to enumerate
only a portion would be an irksome as well as an endless task.
PRINTS BY MEANS OF A SERIES OF WOOD BLOCKS.
The Author, at page 249 of this Memoir, in stating what he believes
may be done by the printing of large wood cuts from two or more
blocks, so as to rival the landscapes of William Woollett on copper,
intimates his intention of making the attempt, to show that it is not a
visionary theory. With this view, he executed a large wood cut, the
subject being an old horse “waiting for death.” A first proof was
taken a few days before his death. An impression at the same time
was transferred to a second block, the exact size of the first, and
was intended to have been engraved to heighten and improve the
effect of the print; and a third was prepared to be used if necessary.
A few impressions of the first of the series were printed in London in
1832, and were accompanied by a descriptive history of the horse,
written so far back as 1785. The print (in a finished state) was
intended to have been dedicated to the “Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals,” and was also meant to serve as one of a set
of cheap embellishments for the walls of cottages. The history of the
old horse “waiting for death” is subjoined.[43]
 WAITING FOR DEATH.
In the morning of his days he was handsome, sleek as a raven,
sprightly and spirited, and was then much caressed and happy.
When he grew to perfection, in his performances, even on the turf,
and afterwards in the chase, and in the field, he was equalled by few
of his kind. At one time of his life he saved that of his master, whom
he bore, in safety, across the rapid flood; but having, in climbing the
opposite rocky shore, received a blemish, it was thought prudent to
dispose of him; after which he fell into the hands of different
masters, but from none of them did he ever eat the bread of
idleness; and, as he grew in years, his cup of misery was still
augmented with bitterness.
It was once his hard lot to fall into the hands of Skinflint, a horse-
keeper, an authorised wholesale and retail dealer in cruelty, who
employed him alternately, but closely, as a hack, both in the chaise
and for the saddle; for when the traces and trappings, used in the
former, had peeled the skin from off his breast, shoulders, and sides,
he was then, as his back was whole, thought fit for the latter;
indeed, his exertions, in this service of unfeeling avarice and folly,
were great beyond belief. He was always, late and early, made ready
for action; he was never allowed to rest, even on the Sabbath day,
because he could trot well, had a good bottom, and was the best
hack in town; and, it being a day of pleasure and pastime, he was
much sought after by beings, in appearance, something like
gentlemen; in whose hands his sufferings were greater than his
nature could bear. Has not the compassionate eye beheld him
whipped, spurred, and galloped beyond his strength, in order to
accomplish double the length of the journey that he was engaged to
perform, till, by the inward grief expressed in his countenance, he
seemed to plead for mercy, one would have thought most
powerfully, but, alas, in vain! In the whole load which he bore (as
was often the case), not an ounce of humanity could be found; and,
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